DA John T. Adams of Berks County accepted $500 campaign contributions from the Flyers Victory Fund in August 2008 and August 2009, according to campaign finance reports issued by both the Pennsylvania Department of State and the Berks County Registrar of Voters.

Johnna Seeton, a certified humane society police officer for the Pennsylvania Legislative Animal Network (PLAN), says she documented what she believed were acts of animal cruelty at a pigeon shoot on Sunday, Oct. 18, 2009, sponsored by the Pike Township Sportsman’s Association near Oley, about 55 miles northwest of Philadelphia. Seeton had gone to the shoot, but had to watch the killings from public roads and driveways of nearby residents who had given her permission.

Typically, at a pigeon shoot, one bird is confined to a small box about 25–30 yards in front of the firing line. The birds are released from the spring-loaded boxes known as “traps,” and the shooter fires at five separately released birds in five separate rounds, as if firing at clay pigeons in a trap or skeet shoot. Each shooter tries to kill a total of 25 birds, each falling within a designated circle, for a perfect score. The birds, when first released from the boxes, are often dazed and confused, sometimes by lack of adequate nutrition or confinement in small cages before the shoot and within the closed box during the shoot. As many as three-fourths of all birds, according to investigators from the Humane Society of the United States, are not killed instantly, but are wounded, usually to die slow and painful deaths. At the Pikeville shoot were two separate fields, each with nine boxes that were refilled during the day. About 1,000–1,500 birds became targets. At the “state shoot” on Feb. 20 and 21, about 75–90 persons fired shotgun pellets at about 5,000 birds that were released from 27 boxes on three separate shooting fields.

The wounded or dead birds are picked up by trapper boys and girls, usually 12–16 years old, put into nets and taken to a shed, where their heads are cut off with shears. Sometimes, the trappers just wring their necks, sometimes hours after the bird is wounded. Even then, many live long enough to suffocate from being thrown into barrels. The carcasses are usually thrown into the garbage. Although most pigeon shooters claim they are ridding the state of “vermin,” calling them “winged rats,” the reality is that most of the birds are raised to be shot, captured, or brought in from out of state specifically for the shoots. The largest broker for pigeon shoots lives in Strausstown, Pa., about 30 miles northwest of Oley.

The shooters, who must be at least 12 years old, pay entry fees; many of them place illegal side bets. Drinking is common at pigeon shoots.

Pennsylvania is the only state where live pigeon shoots are still openly practiced. “Live pigeon shoots are similar to cockfighting or dog fighting, where it is largely an underground circuit of the same people who follow it around,” says Heidi Prescott, senior vice-president of the 11.6 million member Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). The Pennsylvania Council of Churches, in opposing pigeon shoots, declared, “[T]he use of live animals for target practice in a contest does not honor the integrity of God’s good creation.”

Johnna Seeton says she returned to the Pike Township site two days after the pigeon shoot, and found live wounded birds, which she took to a veterinarian for treatment. “Some had to be euthanized because of extensive injuries,” she says. Necropsies showed that pellets had hit vital organs, but the birds lived, often in extreme pain, for as many as two days. Birds that fall outside club property typically die from the pellets hitting vital organs, broken bones, internal hemorrhaging, nerve damage, or from infection, starvation, dehydration, or external parasite attacks. Seeton says she was able to rescue some because they fell onto public property. She had no legal authority to rescue the dying birds on the club’s private property.

Seeton had filed three separate animal cruelty citations with District Judge Victor Frederick IV on Dec. 10, 2009, against the Pike Township Sportsmen’s Association, charging it with animal cruelty. Four days later, she says Adams called her, said that he reviewed the charges, and said he would not allow her to prosecute the case, nor would he allow anyone else to prosecute the case.

In a 20 minute conversation, the DA demanded Seeton withdraw charges, citing what he believed were court precedents that would prohibit the filing of charges against organizers of pigeon shoots. Gordon Einhorn, Harrisburg, attorney, for the Pennsylvania Legislative Animal Network, then contacted Adams to try to understand why the DA wouldn’t allow the complaint, and to explain Pennsylvania law and relevant precedent. “It was somewhat of a heated discussion,” says Einhorn.

Adams says the law “is quite specific that pigeon shoots do not constitute cruelty to animals and that organizers of pigeon shoots do not have to have a veterinarian to care for wounded birds.” Adams, who is not a hunter, says he has no position about pigeon shoots, but that, “Although I sympathize with [those who oppose the pigeon shoots], their anger is misplaced; they must contact the Legislature” for recourse. Adams says his office can “only enforce the law; we cannot make it.” Adams, says Seeton, said that his decision not to allow prosecution and allow the court or a jury to determine the merits of the case, was final. “I wasn’t challenging the legality of pigeon shoots,” says Seeton, “only the animal cruelty for allowing wounded birds to die slow painful deaths.” On Jan. 13, 2010, in response to Adams’ demands, DJ Victor Frederick refused to allow Seeton to proceed with her charges. He withdrew the charges in front of an assistant district attorney.

To support his refusal to allow prosecution of the animal cruelty complaint, Adams cites a decision in the Berks County Court of Common Pleas in April 2002 [Seeton v. Pike Township Sportsmen's Association], which he says established that pigeon shoots are legal, and that recourse is through legislation. However, the ruling by Common Pleas Court Judge Scott E. Lash wasn’t a decision, but only a judicial memorandum to a motion for a preliminary injunction, and was not based upon evidence presented in trial. The Memorandum was the result of an appeal of a decision two months earlier. The opinion by Judge Lash was rendered before the Plaintiff had the opportunity to conduct discovery, present evidence, and examine witnesses. Because the case is still pending, and never received a final judgment, it cannot be used as legal precedent, says Einhorn. In that Memorandum, Judge Lash, who several times referred to any individual shooting at birds in a pigeon shoot as a “sportsman,” determined that there was no intent to wound birds and, thus, not a violation of the state law. He cited an 1891 case [Commonwealth v. Lewis] in which the appellant judge ruled that “the defendant has merely been punished for want of skill” by only wounding, not killing, pigeons at a shoot at the Philadelphia Gun Club in Eddington, Bucks County. That appeal had reversed a trial court case four years earlier, in which Judge Harman Yerkes had called pigeon shooting “cruel and barbarous” and a violation of animal abuse statute. However, in that reversal, the presiding judge ruled that there was no animal cruelty because the wounded bird was immediately killed.

An 1860 state law declared that animal cruelty is an “offense against pubic morals and decency.” However, Adams claims that pigeon shoots do not constitute a violation of Title 18, section 5511(c), the Cruelty to Animals statute. That statute, within the Pennsylvania Crimes Code, states that a person is guilty of animal cruelty if he or she “wantonly or cruelly ill treats, overloads, beats, otherwise abuses any animal, or neglects any animal as to which he has a duty of care, whether belonging to himself or otherwise, or abandons any animal, or deprives any animal of necessary sustenance, drink, shelter or veterinary care, or access to clean and sanitary shelter which will protect the animal against inclement weather and preserve the animal’s body heat and keep it dry.” Seeton says the Pike Township Sportsmen’s Association violated several provisions of that statute. The penalty for animal cruelty, a summary offense, is a fine of $50–$750 and/or up to 90 days in jail.

In 1980, the Court of Common Pleas for Monroe County ruled that persons are in violation of the animal cruelty statute if they fail to assist an animal when they “know or reasonably should know that [they have] conceivably injured [the animal." [Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Fabian]. In 1995, the Pennsylvania Superior Court determined that the manner in which injured pigeons are treated could constitute a violation of the Animal Abuse law [Mohler v. Labor Day Committee]. A Pennsylvania Superior Court decision in 2003 established that persons violate the animal cruelty statute when they commit “acts or conduct which cause pain and suffering [including] acts of omission, neglect, and the like, whereby the same kind of suffering is caused or permitted [and are] done recklessly and without regard to the consequences.” [Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Simpson].

Seeton’s charges are that the birds are usually neglected and left wounded for long periods of time. Under existing animal cruelty law, says Einhorn, “it is clear that pigeons are covered.” Nevertheless, Judge Lash in his Memorandum had determined, possibly against existing state law, that the presence of a veterinarian to treat wounded birds or to humanely euthanize those who had no hope of recovery was “impractical,” “unworkable,” and its cost was “prohibitive.”

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in Hulsizer v. Labor Day Committee (1999), specifically noted that at the pigeon shoot in Hegins in Schuylkill County, at that time the largest in the nation, pigeons suffered slow and painful deaths and that severely wounded birds were not given veterinary care nor were euthanized in a humane method. The Court stated the Plaintiff’s view that pigeon shoots are “cruel and moronic.” The Court did not specifically rule that pigeon shoots were illegal. However, the Court set precedent by deciding that humane society officers had authority to pursue abuse charges against all state pigeon shoots.

Although the district attorney of Berks County refused to allow prosecution of animal cruelty charges, Dauphin County District Attorney Ed Marsico, whose jurisdiction includes the state capital of Harrisburg, had no similar problem with the intent of the state’s animal cruelty laws. On March 11, in the court of District Justice Rebecca Margarum of Elizabethville, Seeton filed 23 separate charges against the Erdman Sportsmen’s Association for a pigeon shoot on June 7, 2009. She cited violation of section 5511(c), the same section she used in her complaint against the Pikeville club. Marsico, says Seeton, “not only allowed the filing but also supported it.”

Over the past two decades, several bills to ban pigeon shoots have been written by state legislators; none have passed. The House of Representatives in 1994 voted 99–93 to ban the shoot, but needed 102 votes for passage. Several other attempts to ban pigeon shoots have been blocked by House or Senate leadership or were allowed to die in committees. Forty-seven current state senators and representatives, between 2004 and the end of 2009, received $45,685 in campaign funds from the Flyers Victory Fund and the NRA Political Victory Fund, according to records of the Pennsylvania Department of State. During those years, the Flyers and the NRA campaign committees donated a total of $62,394 to 64 candidates or legislators. Rep. John M. Perzel (R-Philadelphia), House speaker from April 2003 to January 2007, received $3,500 from the NRA Political Victory Fund in 2005 and 2006. The 14 current House and Senate leaders received $14,500. H. William DeWeese (D-Greene, and parts of Fayette and Washington counties) received $9,000 from the NRA Political Victory Fund; DeWeese was House speaker 1993–1994, Democratic leader 1995–2006 and majority leader, 2007–2008. Both Perzel and DeWeese have been instrumental in blocking legislation to prohibit live pigeon shoots.

The current bills [H.R. 1411 and S.B. 843] are stalled in committee. Despite strong co-sponsor support, bills to ban live pigeon shoots have not received a vote in more than a decade, although leaders in both the House and the Senate have repeatedly promised to bring it to the floor. “This bill is an imaginary boogieman in the minds of a few legislators,” says Heidi Prescott of the HSUS. She believes “no legislator is going to lose their job for voting to end a very cruel practice with only a handful of supporters.” The cost to the Commonwealth, says Prescott “is probably a lot more to block the bill than to finally get rid of this very cruel, pitiless practice.” Prescott has been personally active for more than 20 years in her opposition to what she calls “barbaric and cruel,” but which crowds who attend pigeon shoots believe is “entertainment,” and the shooters call a “sport.”

Killing trapped pigeons isn’t a sport, according to the International Olympic Committee, which banned pigeon shooting after its only appearance in the 1900 Olympics. The reason why pigeon shooting isn’t recognized as a sport was best explained by the IOC. “It’s cruelty,” it said after thinking about the Olympics’ only bloody “sport.” Great Britain banned live pigeon shoots it in 1921, and most countries now ban the practice. Jerry Feaser, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, agrees that pigeon shooting isn’t sport. Pigeon shoots, he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in December 2007, “are not what we would classify as fair-chase hunting,” nor are pigeons considered to be wild animals. In the Seeton v. Pike Township Sportsmen’s Association case, the Court had thrown out the Defendant’s argument that the “hunting exception” to the animal cruelty statute was an acceptable defense against animal cruelty. Four years later, in Covington Township v. Moscow Sportsmen’s Club, the Court of Common Pleas for Lackawanna County granted a preliminary injunction requested by township officials, and reaffirmed the belief that pigeons are not “game birds,” and did not fall within the hunting exception to the statute. Former State Sen. Roy Afflerbach, a lifelong sportsman who began hunting as a child, and who introduced the first Senate bill to prohibit live pigeon shoots, says “launching birds or animals from traps in front of awaiting shooters, who wound more animals than they kill, is not hunting; the hunters I know think it is nothing more than a slob blood-fest and a black eye to the image of hunting.”

There were about two dozen shoots since Sept. 5, 2009, at the Pikeville and Wing Pointe gun clubs in Berks County, and one at Erdman in Dauphin County, with one more scheduled for June 6. The Philadelphia Gun Club in Eddington (Bucks County) began hosting pigeon shoots again last year after township officials had issued a cease and desist order in May 2002, citing violations of both a township ordinance and the state law against cruelty to animals. However, in 2008, in violation of the cease and desist order, the Gun Club held another shoot. Wounded birds landed on neighbors’ property or in the Delaware River. Charges were filed against Leo A. Holt, club president, but were withdrawn in March 2009 under a “gentleman’s agreement” that the club would no long conduct pigeon shoots. The club has routinely violated that agreement. Holt, his brothers Thomas Jr. and Michael, their father, Thomas Sr., and Thomas Jr’s wife, Angela, contributed $53,300 in campaign funds to members and candidates of the Legislature between 2004 and the end of 2009, including $16,500 to House Speaker John M. Perzel between 2005 and 2008, according to records of the Pennsylvania Department of State.

There may be absolutely no cause-and-effect relationship between donations to Adams’ campaign and his stand on permitting live pigeon shoots. However, animal cruelty will probably continue to be a part of the culture of Berks County, at least as long as John T. Adams is the DA.

Walter Brasch is a professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University. His most recent book is Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush. He can be reached at brasch@bloomu.edu. He first began covering Pennsylvania’s pigeon shoots in 1993. You may contact him through his website, walterbrasch.com.

Correction/Update: This story reported that the suicides of three individuals in Glasgow were Kosovo nationals. Later reports have identified the individuals who died in the leap off the 15th story of an apartment building as Serguei Serykh, 43, his wife Tatiana and Mr. Serykh’s adult stepson. A BBC story on March 13 said the family had previously been granted political asylum in Canada, but had left after an some kind of dispute with authorities there. They had recently been denied an application for asylum in the UK, and on the day they died had received a letter that they would lose their apartment, although no order for removal had yet been filed. Extrapolating from a Globe and Mail report on March 10, it appears possible that Mr. Serykh suffered from a serious mental illness.

The suicides of these desperate individuals have brought organized protests in Scotland, with marchers calling for an end to the “enforced removal of refugee families,” according to the BBC report. A later article by the UK Guardian quotes the director of the Glasgow charity Positive Action in Housing, Robina Qureshi, as saying the family’s death could not be attributed to psychological issues, but UK asylum policy. “The Serykhs were considered credible in Canada,” Qureshi said. “Shouldn’t that be good enough for us? They were going to be out on the street, destitute. What would that do to your mental state?”

Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist living in Northern California who writes regularly on torture and other subjects for The Public Record, Truthout and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com

President Richard Nixon's secretary Rose Mary Woods demonstrates the backwards-leaning stretch with which she erased eighteen-and-a-half minutes of a key Watergate conversation recorded on White House tapes.

Via George Washington University’s National Security Archive:

The Rosemary Award for worst open government performance, named after President Nixon’s secretary who erased 18 ½ minutes of a crucial Watergate tape, this year goes to the Federal Chief Information Officers Council, the senior federal officials (responsible for $71 billion a year of IT purchases) who have never addressed the failure of the government to save its e-mail electronically, according to the citation Friday by the National Security Archive.

Formed by Executive Order in 1996 and codified in law by Congress in the 2002 E-Government Act, the CIO Council describes itself as the “principle interagency forum for improving practices in the design, modernization, use, operation, sharing, and performance of Federal Government information resources.” Yet neither the Council’s founding documents, its 2007-2009 strategic plan, its transition memo for the Obama administration, nor its current Web site even mention the challenge of electronic records management for e-mail.

Last month, the Justice Department investigation of former senior officials John Yoo and Jay Bybee over their authorship of the so-called “torture memos” revealed that “most of Yoo’s email records had been deleted and were not recoverable.” The Yoo deletions represent only the latest red flag about government e-mail preservation – dating back to the January 1989 attempt by the Reagan administration to destroy its e-mail backup tapes, thwarted by the National Security Archive’s lawsuit.

A 2008 survey by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and OpenTheGovernment.org did not find a single federal agency policy that mandates an electronic record keeping system agency-wide. Congressional testimony in 2008 by the Government Accountability Office indicted the standard “print and file” approach by pointing out: “agencies recognize that devoting significant resources to creating paper records from electronic sources is not a viable long-term strategy”; yet GAO concluded even the “print and file” system was failing to capture the historic records “for about half of the senior officials” checked – John Yoo’s peers.

“The CIO Council has a bad case of attention deficit disorder when it comes to the e-mail disaster in the federal government,” commented Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive and author of a book on the e-mail lawsuit against the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations. “We hope this year’s Rosemary Award will serve as a wake up call to the government officials who have the power, the money and the responsibility to save the e-mail sent in the course of the public’s business.”

The disaster of disappeared e-mail implicates almost every agency of the U.S. government, not only the Department of Justice which could not recover the Yoo e-mails. The National Archives and Records Administration also bears responsibility for coming up with the “print and file” approach to begin with, but NARA’s $400 million budget is miniscule compared to the annual IT spending of $71 billion over which the federal government’s CIO’s preside, so the CIO Council won the 2010 Rosemary Award based on the well-established Watergate principle of “follow the money.”

The only part of the federal government that seems to be facing up to the e-mail preservation challenge with any kind of “best practice” is the White House, where the Obama administration installed on day one an e-mail archiving system that preserves and manages even the President’s own Blackberry messages.

The National Security Archive brought the original White House e-mail lawsuit against President Reagan in early 1989, and continued the litigation against Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, until court orders compelled the White House to install the “ARMS” system to archive e-mail. The Archive sued the George W. Bush administration in 2007 after discovering that the Bush White House had junked the Clinton system without replacing the systematic archiving functions. CREW subsequently joined this suit and with the Archive negotiated a settlement with the Obama administration that included the recovery of as many as 22 million e-mails that were previously missing or mis-filed.

As a result of the two decades of the Archive’s White House e-mail litigation, several hundred thousand e-mails survive from the Reagan White House, nearly a half million from the George H.W. Bush White House, 32 million from the Clinton White House, and an estimated 220 million from the George W. Bush White House.

Previous recipients of the Rosemary Award include the FBI in 2009 (for having a record-setting rate of “no records” responses to FOIA requests), the Treasury Department in 2008 (for shredding FOIA requests and delaying responses for decades), the Air Force in 2007, and the Central Intelligence Agency in 2006. The Award is named after President Nixon’s long-time secretary Rose Mary Woods and the backwards-leaning stretch – answering the phone while keeping her foot on the pedal of a tape transcription machine – that she testified caused the erasure of an 18 ½ minute section of a key Watergate conversation on the White House tapes.

And once again the US media remain mute, accepting the official story, which was of ISAF forces responding to an attack which in reality appears never to have happened.

Before I started to write this piece, which once again was broken by the intrepid Jerome Starkey, a reporter in Afghanistan who works for the Times of London, I thought maybe I should read the Sunday edition of the New York Times, to see whether America’s “paper of record” had reported on this latest atrocity. But the night before we had suffered a heavy storm that knocked down three large trees in my front yard, and there was currently a thunderstorm underway, with rain pouring down, so I decided, what the hell, I’ll just write it. There’s no way the Times would cover this story.

I was right, of course. When the rain let up, and I went out and got the paper, and scoured it for word of this latest obscene slaughter by US forces, I found nothing. The Times’ reporters in Afghanistan and the reporters in the paper’s Washington bureau who cover the Pentagon had ignored it. So, a Google search discloses, did the rest of the servile US media.

So what actually happened?

According to Starkey, US and Afghan Army forces on February 12 launched a pre-dawn assault on the home of a prominent and popular policeman’s home just outside of Gardez, the capital of Paktia province in eastern Afghanistan. The first person to die was reportedly the policeman himself, Commander Dawood, who had stood in his doorway protesting the innocence of his family. In the volley of fire directed against him by the brave US-led team, his pregnant wife, another pregnant woman and an 18-year-old girl were also slaughtered.

Commander Dawood had been hosting a party to celebrate the naming of a newborn baby boy, Starkey reported. As he writes:

Sitting together along the walls of a guest room, the men had taken turns dancing while musicians played. Mohammed Sediq Mahmoudi, 24, the singer, said that at some time after 3am one of the musicians, Dur Mohammed, went outside to go to the toilet. “Someone shone a light on his face and he ran back inside and said the Taliban were outside,” Mr Sediq said.

Also killed was Dawood’s brother, Saranwal Zahir, a local prosecutor, who had been shouting for soldiers not to shoot as women had run outside to tend to the wounded.

A younger brother of the two men, Mohammed Sabir, was arrested by the invading forces and brought to a US base, where he was held for several days and interrogated by “ an American in civilian clothes,” before being released. Sabir said he was shown photos of a man who had been at the party, a certain Shamsuddin. Sabir says he told the interrogatyor, “Yes, he was at the party. Why didn’t you arrest him?” The man in question, Shamsuddin, later turned himself in and was, after questioning, reportedly also released.

Raising the question, what was this raid, and all the pointless killing, about in the first place?

As Starkey writes, the US and the ISAF initially, following what appears to be standard operating procedure, concocted a lie about the incident In a release immediately afterward, under the headline, “Joint force operating in Gardez makes gruesome discovery,” the NATO release claimed that the US-led team had found the women’s bodies “tied up, gagged and killed” in a room. That statement went on to say: “Several insurgents engaged the joint force in a firefight and were killed.”

As Starkey, who charges NATO with a “coverup,” reports: “The family, however, insists that no one threw so much as a stone.”

He goes on:

Rear Admiral Greg Smith, NATO’s director of communications in Kabul, denied that there had been any attempt at a cover-up.

He said that both the men who were killed were armed and showing “hostile intent” but admitted “they were not the targets of this particular raid.”

“I don’t know if they fired any rounds,” he said. “If you have got an individual stepping out of a compound, and if your assault force is there, that is often the trigger to neutralise the individual. You don’t have to be fired upon to fire back.”

He admitted that the original statement had been “poorly worded” but said “to people who see a lot of dead bodies” the women had appeared at the time to have been dead for several hours.

Starkey reports that the Americans offered the distraught family $2000 per victim of the botched raid. But as the mother of the slain brothers, Bibi Sabsparie, told him bitterly, “There’s no value on human life. They killed our family, then they came and brought us money. Money won’t bring our family back.”

So once again, we have a massacre (in a night-time raid that occurred two weeks after the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal ordered an end to the practice because of the number of errors and civilian deaths, and the bad public relations such raids cause among Afghans), with no coverage by the US media.

Meanwhile, Starkey says that even in the UK, his stories have been ignored by the rest of the British media, and that his own efforts to get at the truth have begun causing problems with the US-led military command in Afghanistan.

As he told one reader who had written him to congratulate him on his work:

Word in Kabul is that NATO are turning their wrath on me, personally,

and about to release a rebuttal. All of a sudden it’s a daunting

prospect and more than ever I feel what it must be like to be churned

through the military machine. It’s good to know people appreciate it.

I’ve also had emails from the victims’ family, which is heartening.

It is not easy to be an honest reporter in wartime, where sycophancy and blind patriotism are what is demanded. Sadly, the US media are taking the easy way out, accepting the rules of being embedded, which require them to submit articles for censorship, to avoid being critical and to play the game, in return for getting easy human interest stories to send back to the readers and viewers back home.

That’s not journalism. It’s PR. It ought to be labeled as such.

Extra! Also ignored by the Times and most of the rest of the US corporate media was a historic decision by a federal judge in Chicago on March 4 to compel former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to respond to charges by to US torture victims that Rumsfeld authorized their torture by US forces at Camp Cropper in Iraq. The two men, David Vance and Nathan Ertel, were whistleblowers against the private security (mercenary) firm that had hired them, claiming it was secretly providing arms to insurgents. Instead of getting the firm investigated, they were arrested by US troops and held–and tortured, they claim–for three months, before being released without charge and sent home to the US.

Their attorney, Mike Kanovitz of Chicago’s Loevy & Loevy, correctly calls the quashing of Rumsfeld’s effort to have the suit against him thrown out, “pretty historic”–a former secretary of defense is being accused of authorizing the torture of American citizens and will have to answer the charge in a federal court–but you wouldn’t know it from the response of the US mainstream media, which has been…nothing.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Last month when we first wrote about the faux “Census” mailers from the Republican National Committee, we reported that though deceptive, the mailings were likely legal.

That could change soon.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives unanimously passed legislation that specifically bans misleading mailings that are designed to look like they’re from the Census Bureau. The new bill requires that any mailing marked “census” include the sender’s name and address, plus a disclaimer that the survey is “not affiliated with the federal government,” reports the Associated Press.

At the time, the fake census mailings — which were really fundraising surveys from the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee — drew criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike. Though Politico reports that such mailings from Republicans have been around for several years, the practice was of particular concern this year because of the 2010 census. The U.S. Census Bureau itself has warned that the use of misleading forms could undermine response for the official census and increase the costs of follow-up.

The bill goes to the Senate next, where it is expected to move forward.

Jamil, of Annandale, Va., was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Claude M. Hilton in the Eastern District of Virginia. He pleaded guilty on Aug. 11, 2009, to a one-count information charging him with conspiracy to steal government property.

In his guilty plea, Jamil admitted that in March 2007, he and two of his co-conspirators arranged for the creation of a false memorandum for record (MFR) authorizing individuals, purportedly on behalf of a company serving as a contractor to the U.S. government, to draw fuel from the Victory Bulk Fuel Point (VBFP), Camp Liberty, Iraq, which was owned and operated by the United States. The VBFP supplies aviation and diesel fuel to both military units and U.S. government contractors operating in and around the Victory Base Complex. Jamil admitted that he and his co-conspirators used this false MFR and others to steal large quantities of fuel from the U.S. Army for subsequent sale on the black market. Jamil admitted that he escorted the trucks to retrieve fuel from the VBFP using a false MFR on approximately 10 to 15 occasions. As a result of the scheme, Jamil received between $75,000 and $87,500 in personal profits.

In related cases, Robert Jeffery was convicted on Aug. 11, 2009, after a two-day jury trial of one count of conspiracy and one count of theft of government property for his role in the fuel theft. Evidence at trial established that Jeffery served as an escort for the fuel trucks and illegally retrieved hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel from the VBFP. On Dec. 11, 2009, Jeffery was sentenced to four years in prison.

Robert Young pleaded guilty on July 24, 2009, to participating in the same scheme. In his plea, Young admitted that he and his co-conspirators employed several individuals to serve as drivers and escorts of the trucks containing the stolen fuel. Young admitted that he received approximately $1 million in personal profits from the scheme. On Nov. 6, 2009, Young was sentenced to 97 months in prison.

Lee William Dubois pleaded guilty on Oct. 7, 2008, to participating in the same scheme. In his plea, Dubois admitted that he obtained government-issued common access cards for the drivers and escorts of the trucks and also presented false documents to the VBFP authorizing his co-conspirators to draw fuel. Dubois admitted that he received at least $450,000 in personal profits from the scheme. On Aug. 25, 2009, Dubois was sentenced to three years in prison.

The case was prosecuted by Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Linick, Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section, and Fraud Section Trial Attorneys Andrew Gentin and Brigham Cannon. The investigation of this case was conducted by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, the FBI, and members of the National Procurement Fraud Task Force and the International Contract Corruption Task Force (ICCTF).

The National Procurement Fraud Task Force, created in October 2006 by the Department of Justice, was designed to promote the early detection, identification, prevention and prosecution of procurement fraud associated with the increase in government contracting activity for national security and other government programs. The ICCTF is a joint law enforcement agency task force that seeks to detect, investigate and dismantle corruption and contract fraud resulting from U.S. Overseas Contingency Operations, including in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait.

I’m not against moving bills forward, even meaningless bills if they send a helpful message. I’m not against ending the war in a way that leaves the president in charge of Congress, if that proves the fastest way to end the war — even though it leaves us in a state in which more wars are inevitable. I don’t think we’re especially likely to force the House to cut off the funding next month.

But forcing a debate on the war, and forcing congress members to put their names down on one side or the other, does not make those members more likely to stick with those positions. It makes them more likely to oppose the wars. Why? Because it raises public awareness and public pressure. Those who voted to end the war are now being thanked and rewarded and pressured to vote no on funding what they just claimed to want to end. Those who voted to keep the war in Afghanistan going are now being pressured to change that position in a way that they were not when all was silent. Hayden, of all people, is leaving the public out of his calculations.

If we are handed an opportunity to — at least temporarily — block the funding, because all the Republicans vote No for some unrelated reason, we will need to seize that opportunity. It will increase the same dynamic of public involvement. It will advance a strategy that is one of the most likely to eventually end the wars. And it will advance an understanding of power dynamics in Washington that will discourage wars by shifting war powers back away from presidents, something that will also be needed in the coming months if we are to end the war in Iraq that too many people naively believe we’ve already ended.

Those who think that opposing wars should involve, you know, opposing wars, should build on the recent debate and vote, by joining in upcoming actions including:
Brown Bag Vigils, and
Peace of the Action.

Pelosi does not sincerely want anything substantive and tends to lie whenever her lips move. And here’s what she says about war and impeachment:

Pelosi: The issue that … bothers me the most is the issue of the Iraq War. There’s so much evidence that there was no reason for us to go into that war at that time or to go into it period. But to think that thousands of lives have been lost, lives affected to the tune of hundreds of thousands, the cost in terms of our military readiness it has not made our military stronger, in terms of dollars to the treasury, but again most of all loss of lives our precious treasure on this war and there was really no price to pay for it so…

Maddow: Do you regret having taken impeachment off the table?

Pelosi: No, no, I believe that the if there was evidence, if we could have the evidence to impeach the president then that could come forward. Just because I say it’s off doesn’t mean if the evidence is there that something wouldn’t go forward. It’s not a question of not knowing where the culpability is, it’s what you can demonstrate and what you can prove. But I do think that those who had a hand in perpetrating not just going to war but misrepresentations to the American people – . Every piece of evidence that we have points to the fact that there was no reason in terms of weapons of mass destruction to go into Iraq…. It’s one of the great tragedies.

So it is. And truly tragic as well is the brazenness of it. Pelosi’s poodle, John Conyers, who backed off impeachment at her command, offered a wide and varying and self-contradictory list of excuses why, but never present among those excuses was any claim of lacking evidence. Conyers’ committee staff spent most of the relevant years publishing books documenting the evidence. His excuses were about electoral campaigns and the corporate media and the likelihood of winning conviction in the Senate.

The level of mendacity in Pelosi’s remarks above, her dedication to obeying the president (articulated just prior to what I’ve quoted), and her allegiance to the war machine: this is what we are up against. We will not defeat it without a massive public movement. We will not generate a massive public movement if we are afraid of raising the issue, pressing our demands forward, naming names, and rewarding and punishing elected officials as merited. This is a life and death struggle, brothers and sisters, and it’s not going to be won through fear, stealth, or timidity.

David Swanson is co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org and author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town by visiting davidswanson.org/book.

President Barack Obama is seen through the eyepiece of a video camera as he delivers remarks on health care reform at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa., March 8, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Samantha Appleton)

President Barack Obama is out and abroad stumping like mad for his embattled health insurance “reform” plan, claiming now that his administration will “crack down” on $100 billion in annual “waste and fraud” in the Medicare and Medicaid systems.

This new tough rhetoric is meant to win over some of the conservative opposition that sees all government programs as inherently wasteful, inefficient and corrupt.

But the claim itself is bogus.

The figure comes from a study done annually by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and that study makes it clear that it is not looking at fraud, but at errors. And there are two things that can be said about those errors, most of which appear to involve problems like illegible signatures on doctors’ orders, or lost paperwork needed to document that a treatment being billed for actually happened.

The first point to make here is that such errors are equally prevalent in the private sector, only the chances are that in the private sector, the errors more often lead to shortchanging or denying care to the patient, while in the public sector, they as often lead to somebody or some institution getting paid more than they deserve for treating a patient.

Second, the errors in the Medicare program (there has been no systematic study, according to a spokesman at CMS, of error and fraud in the Medicaid program, much of which is funded and managed by the various states), cut both ways, with some errors leading to an overpayment or a payment for a service that wasn’t actually provided, and some errors leading to an underpayment for a service that was provided. Also not reported at all are errors that led to a person’s being improperly denied care altogether. (The same is true for the Veteran’s Administration, by the way, which is notorious among veterans for improperly denying claims of service-connected disabilities.)

According to the latest CMS report, the error rate for Medicaid parts A and B–the hospital and physician part of the program, was 7.9 percent or approximately $24 billion. Of this, $23 billion was said to involve overpayments, and $1.1 billion was said to involve underpayments. The underpayment figure looks suspicious, because in prior years, when the overpayment figure was roughly $9-$10 billion annually, the underpayments came in at about $1 billion also. It seems unlikely that overpayment errors in 2009 would more than double, while underpayment errors would stay the same.

Nearly all the underpayment errors–$800 million worth in 2009–were for inpatient care. This compared to $6 billion in overpayment errors. In otherwords roughly two out of every 15 errors involved the patient or the patient’s physician or hospital being shorted by Medicare.

CMS claims that the estimated error rate for Medicaid in 2009 was 8.7% for the federal government and 10.5% for the states and counties that administer the program locally. That would be $39 billion of the $98 billion in errors and fraud found in both programs combined for the year by CMS, and cited by President Obama in his “$100 billion in waste and fraud” claim.

But bear in mind that unlike Medicare, Medicaid is a welfare program, which means that the bias is towards denying benefits to applicants, as anyone who has had experience with Medicaid can tell you. Furthermore it is a program administered by both state and federal bureaucrats.

Back in 1977, when I was county government bureau chief for the Los Angeles Daily News, I got an urgent call from my editor, telling me to hop on a story based upon a release by the L.A. County Department of Social Services claiming to have discovered that 5.83 percent of welfare recipients were being overpaid because off errors and fraud, and that a campaign was being implemented to attack the problem, which was costing the county millions of dollars a year. Naturally, the editor saw this as a page one piece, perhaps a banner headline, for the next day’s edition.

I called the head of the Department of Social Services and asked a simple question: What is the error rate in the other direction? What percent of welfare applicants and recipients were being undercompensated because of errors? After a little investigation, she returned and informed me that the underpayment error rate was exactly the same: 5.83%! When I reported this back to the City Desk, there was an audible groan on the phone. The story had lost all importance to the editor. And yet, I thought, wasn’t an underpayment of welfare benefits to a poor family of far greater consequence than an overpayment is to the taxpayers? Getting shorted $100, or even $20, for a family living on, or below, the edge, would be catastrophic.

My guess is that a good study of underpayments and overpayments in the Medicaid program of the federal government and the states would more than likely give the same kind of result: an error rate in terms of underprovision of benefits that is equal to in percent and dollar amount the overpayment of benefits. And in fact, with welfare type programs like Medicare, there is also an unmeasured or unmeasurable problem, which is people who are wrongly denied benefits at all. They aren’t underpaid because they are simply turned away from public assistance for health care when they are actually eligible.

The point here is that if there is an error rate of about 9.5% in Medicaid (I’m averaging the federal and state error rate estimates for 2009), then either half of that $39 billion is probably underpayment errors, or, if they are only counting overpayment errors, there is almost certainly another $39 billion that should have been paid out for care of poor families that was not paid out.

Either way, the president’s incendiary claim that there is $100 billion in waste and fraud in the Medicare and Medicaid program is way off the mark.

If the president were serious about the problem, he would call for an honest investigation to make certain that everyone potentially eligible for medical coverage and assistance in both programs gets the full benefits to which they are entitled, to minimize inadvertent overpayments to providers, and to prosecute to the full extent of the law those who defraud either program.

That would be fine and appropriate. But at the same time, the president is also disingenuous in the extreme when he just attacks fraud and waste in Medicare and Medicaid, as though there is not massive fraud and waste in the private insurance industry and the rest of the medical industry. Indeed, much of the fraud in the Medicare program is in that part of it that is contracted out to the private insurance firms that offer the so-called MediGap insurance policies.

Nearly all the rest of the actual fraud is perpetrated by private physicians, private hospitals and by other medical industry firms and pharmaceutical companies, which submit false invoices and charge for services and goods not delivered. And as CBS’s “60-Minutes” program and other news organizations have reported, there has been little or no effort devoted to prosecution of such fraud, though it totals in the tens of billions of dollars per year.

That’s not a problem with “government-run health care”–a bogeyman that the president regularly pulls out to pillory–but with private healthcare.

The president knows this, but since his whole “reform” proposal is built around the private insurance sector, he’s not going to say that.

Then again, what political strategist guru in the White House came up with the idea that attacking alleged “waste and fraud” in “government health care” would be a good way to win support for Obamacare?

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

When you are one of the 180 million Americans now living paycheck-to-paycheck, and you are working 12 – 14 hours a day, six days a week, you have to constantly ask yourself, “Is what I’m doing the most effective way to use my time?”

When it comes to my work here on AmpedStatus, I’m putting more money into it than I’m getting out of it. So, even with the impact and success I’ve been having with recent reports, my mind still questions if I would be better off working on other, more financially rewarding projects. As each month passes, and the bills keep coming, your will and resolve are tested with increased intensity.

When people take time out of their busy schedules to write emails and donate some of their hard-earned money, and when the bad news just keeps piling up with no substantial government actions to combat it, you realize that you must find it within yourself to keep fighting. In the long run, unfortunately, there is really no other option for us. We have been attacked, a war has been launched on us, even though most people are yet to realize this.

My frustration and cynicism is quickly overwhelmed by my survival instinct. As part of this, I must always try to figure out how to be most effective and question my methods. So when someone like Bill Moyers comes along, and quotes your work, you, for a moment, feel a sense of success. Maybe all the hard work is having an affect and paying off, maybe I am getting through to people.

Perhaps it is just my need for some kind of validation, in the face of such a difficult battle, but Bill Moyers has meant a great deal to me over the years. I remember being in middle school, in 1987, and coming across a PBS television show that shocked my young and naïve mind. It was called “The Secret Government: The Constitution In Crisis,” and a man named Bill Moyers gave me my first lesson in how power really works in this country and throughout the world.

I began to get very interested in these deeper political issues that Mr. Moyers revealed and closely followed his work on the Iran-Contra scandal and the Savings & Loan crisis.

At that time, Bill taught me things I could have never learned in my public schooling or through the network news programs that dominated public consciousness. (Keep in mind, the Internet wasn’t even around back then!) So there was much to learn from Mr. Moyers in the late 1980s, just as there is today.

The most important thing he taught me was to always be critical of those with power, to always question and probe below the surface of popular opinion. And I heeded his advice. While my friends and classmates dutifully read their history books and memorized names and dates, I spent my time at the local library looking for books that offered an alternative viewpoint to textbooks that seemed so black-and-white and lacked the depth and critical thoughts that Mr. Moyers made clear were necessary to be an informed citizen, to be a guardian of freedom and democracy.

I took these things very seriously as a kid. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II, and the person for whom I am named, my grandfather’s brother, died during the war fighting for freedom and democracy. One of my most cherished possessions is the US flag that was folded into a triangle and presented to my family at my Uncle’s memorial service. I was instilled with a deep understanding that freedom was not free and you must stay vigilant if democracy is to be preserved. So I was very thankful that Mr. Moyers taught me how to look deeper into the power-addicted forces within human nature that are often behind the scenes conspiring against free people – always looking to gain power from us for their own greedy purposes.

Though it may sound like a dark view to some, this is the reality of the world, a reality my grandparent’s generation knew based on first-hand experience. A reality that has been obscured by an all-pervasive distraction-based, profit-seeking mainstream media system that has created two generations of dangerously naïve people. We have forgotten the lessons of our elders.

My grandparents were born into the Great Depression, an era of Robber Barons and massive income inequality. They had to fight through poverty and a World War. And when the war was over, the battle-tested American public joined together and created a prosperous middle class which blossomed into the greatest super-power this world has ever known.

But as the generations passed, we became complacent. We stopped paying attention to politics. Our free and open society was then easily corrupted by those same power and greed-addicted forces that we once fought off. We ignored politics, as the richest members of the world began to dominate both political parties and take over our country – economically and militarily.

As President Eisenhower warned, a grave danger to our future would become an unchecked military industrial complex, now represented in a private and covert military that in many ways is more powerful than our own citizen military. Along with this, the Robber Barons have returned, stronger than ever. The income inequality between the richest one percent and the remaining 99 percent of our country is the highest it has ever been. When you ignore the lessons of the past, they have a horrifying way of coming back to haunt you.

As Bill Moyers said in 1987, at the end of his report on the Secret Government:

“Can it happen again? You bet it can.… This is a system easily corrupted as the public grows indifferent again, and the press is seduced or distracted. So one day, sadly, we are likely to discover once again that while freedom does have enemies in the world, it can also be undermined here at home, in the dark, by those posing as its friends.”

Unfortunately, Bill hit the nail on the head. In many ways, we are right back to where our grandparents started.

Fast forward to our current crisis, and Bill Moyers still, as always, remains ever so aware and present in our national consciousness. It was almost exactly one year ago when Bill Moyers invited William Black, a world renowned white-collar criminologist, to speak with him on his TV show about the outright fraud and theft of our money. As Bill so eloquently and boldly summed it up, “For months now, revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street have reminded us that ‘The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.’” Bill gave us a revealing and much needed look into the systemic criminal underpinnings of our economic structure.

On March 1st, Bill gave his first public speech in three years, as the final speaker in the Dowmel Lecture series. In the speech, Bill, who once served as President Lyndon Johnson’s chief-of-staff, press secretary and speechwriter, choose to address what he feels is “the greatest threat” to our country: the staggering inequality of wealth and the death of the middle class.

He spoke, as always, in clear and concise language:

“This is my fear… at the end of my long career in journalism.… The isolation of the poor, the plight of a failing middle class, the crumbling of our infrastructure. The reckless disregard for our fiscal affairs and the hijacking of our political process by big money. All tear at the social compact that forge the American consciousness.…

We have come to a critical moment in the long fashioning of a democratic people…. America’s wealth is becoming ever more concentrated… concentration of wealth goes hand-in-hand with concentration of power. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see how its great wealth buys off Washington and turns our watchdogs into lapdogs. You just have to be a good journalist and connect the dots.… The freedoms and rights we cherish were not sent from heaven and do not grow on trees. They were born by centuries of struggle by millions who fought, bled and died… to protect ordinary people from being overrun by massive corporations, to win a safety-net against the sometimes cruel workings of the market… Here is the lesson we must never forget… Democracy only works when people claim it as their own….”

Once again, we owe Bill Moyers thanks for his immense contribution to the understanding, betterment and well-being of our nation. To have him cite my work is truly an honor and an inspiration that will help sustain me through the long days and nights spent researching, writing, communicating and fighting for our democracy, freedom and future.

Bill’s speech is an hour long and well worth your time. You can listen to it here.

David DeGraw is the founder and editor of AmpedStatus.com and director of MediaChannel.org. You can reach him at David@AmpedStatus.com.